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Comment by rfrey | Hacker News Reader

This is not your main point, but in the spirit of Americans overestimating social mobility, you may be overestimating "family values" among the working class. According to the 2015 US census, the share of people who have been divorced at least once is 46% (poor), 41% (working class) and 30% (middle and upper class). Similarly, people who report they are "very happy" in marriage are 54% (poor), 56% (working class) and 65% (middle and upper class). (https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-marriage-divide-how-and-why-w...).

I wasn't able to turn up any stats on lawn care though.

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I think his definition of working class is perhaps different to the definition in your study.

It's one of those terms that are loosely defined (at least in certain societies) and mean very different things to different people.

Is an electrician earning US$80k/year middle class because he's well compensated for his work, or working class because he's doing manual labour?

The phrase "Family Values" is pretty vague, too. I'm sure if you asked almost everyone who is in a family whether they felt they had family values they'd say yes. I'm not really sure what someone means when they say an area has "family values". I don't think it means lack of divorce.

In the 90s, I remember "family values" having been used by politicians as a polite euphemism for the very narrow "straight, Christian, atomic" view of what a family should be.

>I don't think it means lack of divorce.

I'd definitely view a lack of divorce as a pretty big part of it.

But as you said, it's entirely personal and subjective. :)

However you cut it, divorce rates are substantially higher among the working class. If you look at educational attainment:

% divorced among those married, by age 46:

Did not graduate from high school: 58.8

High school graduate, no college: 49.1

Some college or associate degree: 48.5

Bachelor's degree or higher: 29.8

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/pdf/marriage-and-d...

Poor, middle, and upper class are economic distinctions in America. Not social ones. I think OP misstated his alignment to the "working class". He refers to Yuppies in the subsequent sentence which gives a hint that this is a rural/urban divide argument.

But that's just my reading of it.

I'm telling an anecdotal story, and in my area the working class is very Catholic, black, or both. YMMV, not valid in California.

California has one of the lowest divorce rates in the entire country https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/states-with...

California is ~1 point below the national average in marriages and divorces. By comparison, Maine is 4 points over the marriage average and 3 points under the divorce average.

I should have remembered my audience and not made a joke about California's differences from the rest of the country.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/12/united-states...

It's a trite joke not even grounded in reality. Vast swaths of California believe exactly the same shit as the people making those jokes. I mean, I grew up in the mountains, cutting through cow-pastures to get to school. I've yet to hear a California joke that rings true to my experience.

It's the most populous state in the nation, as well as one of the most climactically and geographically diverse states.

There's almost nothing anyone could say that will apply to the whole population or the whole geography, certainly not anything that wouldn't apply equally well (or badly) to all Americans.

Now why would you mention Maine? I guess then I would say Arkansas has the worst divorce rate (https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/states-with... 2020). I assume that's the whole thing we're doing here?, blue state, red state?

I responded to your original comment because you said "and in my area the working class is very Catholic, black, or both. YMMV, not valid in California." which you say is a joke. What's the joke? Now I don't want to accuse you of contributing to this because I have no way of knowing where your beliefs about CA came from by (I'm going to go off on a tangent here) but what I've seen when it comes to California is that people now use it as a negative example for almost every comparison, often without evidence. It's done so much that there's now there's a negative connotation to the state itself that certainly isn't valid in all cases. It's so insidious how a belief / stereotype can just appear out of no where if it's just causally spread out.

Maine isn't hard red, they do lean red but tend to elect very moderate people. I looked at the map of states by divorce and marriage vs the average and noticed Maine is nuptually superior.

California is an exception to all sorts of rules, due in part to its diversity and insane wealth. I could have said "Marriage is known to the State of California to cause cancer" and have been making the same joke.

Please note that I'm northeastern, and Cali/NYC are the butt of almost every joke, because both places have such a massive disconnect from the reality of middle America. I bet people from rural California know exactly the feeling I'm describing.

This may be influenced by the fact that CA also has one of the lowest marriage rates in the country: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/ma...

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